This current crisis felt like we came to the brink of hyperinflation, but managed to scramble through it without quite tipping the balance. Nothing is fundamentally fixed, though, so I expect the next big crisis 5 or 10 years down the road to end with the revaluation of the dollar, Zimbabwe style.

Gold is overhyped right now -- anyone buying gold at the moment is a fool -- and, as a rule of thumb, any commodity that people watch like a hawk (gold, silver, oil) is going to have second-order effects that aren't necessarily correlated with supply/demand and isn't a very safe bet. That said, a lot of other less-watched commodities will be the first in line as newly-printed money trickles out into the economy and fuels an artificial manufacturing boom: copper, zinc, maybe some of the catalyst metals like palladium (too volatile for me), iron/steel to a far lesser extent (again, too volatile for me). If I'd had the money at the time to follow my gut in 2008, I would've made a killing on copper alone -- and if I'd put some into platinum, one year ago, pre-auto-bailout, I'd have made a very comfortable one-year return (on the order of 250%).